[EM] What's wrong with the party list system?

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/7/4 James Gilmour <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>

> Jameson Quinn > Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 5:03 PM
> > As I said in my last message, asset-like systems can let you
> > have your cake and eat it, if you trust your favorite
> > candidate to agree with you in ranking other candidates. This
> > is fundamentally different from trusting your party, because
> > your "favorite candidate" in asset-like systems could, in
> > principle, be arbitrarily close to you - even BE you, if
> > you're willing to give up vote anonymity, and if the system
> > allows this extreme. Most systems will put some limits on
> > this, but still, they are far closer to this extreme than any
> > party list system. Also, there is no need to stay within the
> > arbitrary bounds of any party; a candidate can have
> > affinities based on ideology, so candidates at the fringes of
> > their party (including the centrist fringes) have full freedom.
>
> I am a campaigner for practical reform of voting systems and I do not think
> an asset system or asset-like system will be acceptable
> for partisan public elections  -  certainly not here in the UK.  And I see
> nothing in US or Canadian politics to make me think such
> a system might be any more acceptable there.
>

I disagree, if the asset-like transfers were pre-announced and optional to
the voter. That is, no "smoke-filled room" after the election; everything is
there on the ballot. This still leaves a broad array of possible ballot
formats/complexities and transfer/assignment rules.

JQ


>
>
> > I disagree about the "no such system" statement. I myself
> > have worked out an unpublished system which is not perfectly
> > droop-PR, but is a ~99% approximation thereof; and which is
> > complicated, but still 2n² summable. It's not worth sharing
> > the details here, but, having gone through the exercise, I
> > believe that it should be possible to do better than I did.
>
> If you have done this I would encourage you to write it up for publication
> in the (somewhat informal) technical journal "Voting
> matters".  In the UK we do not sum or count the ballot papers from any
> public elections in the precincts, but it would be very
> interesting to see how this could be done in a practical way for STV-PR or
> a system that would deliver comparable PR results.
>
>
I thank you for your suggestion, and I'll consider it. Just to give you an
idea, my system is bucklin-like (rated ballot considered as a
falling-threshold series of approval ballots); and the summable matrices for
my system, for each approval threshold, are the candidateXcandidate
correlations (co-occurences) and the candidateX(number of ballots with each
number of approvals) matrix. With reasonable assumptions about the
homogeneity of the higher-order candidate correlations, this system gives a
proportional result.

JQ
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